Trump’s State of the Union and the Consequences of Low Expectations

The President’s demands for praise and recognition have grown more emphatic since the passage of the tax bill, but his bid to take ownership of the economy is failing.

Photograph by Yin Bogu / Xinhua / eyevine

Last February, after President Trump delivered his first speech to a
joint session of Congress, many commentators seemed surprised that he
had actually pulled it off—that he had managed to read from a
teleprompter for a full hour without veering off script or insulting
Elizabeth Warren. Trump uttered platitudes about a “renewal of the
American spirit,” just like previous Presidents had done; he made policy
proposals in the traditional manner (by listing too many of them); he
appeared, people said, blessedly “normal.” But the relief was
short-lived. Four days after the speech, Trump falsely charged Barack Obama with “wiretapping” his office building during the
2016 campaign. “Bad (or sick) guy!” he tweeted. It was a reminder that,
while he might stick, from time to time, to a prepared text, Trump
remains self-destructively Trump. Really, we should have expected as
much.

Nearly a year later, on the eve of his first State of the Union address,
expectations of Trump remain stubbornly low. In some respects, the bar
has fallen even further: the question on many Americans’ minds today is
not “What is the state of our union?” but “What is the state of the
President’s mental health?” Neither the White House physician’s stamp of
approval nor Trump’s own insistence that he is, in fact, “stable” has
put the matter to rest. Publications such as Time are still throwing
around terms like “cognitive
impairment”;
STAT, a science-news outlet, has analyzed interviews of Trump, going
back to the nineteen-eighties, and notes a “striking”
deterioration in the “fluency, complexity, and vocabulary level” of his unscripted
remarks. The upside of all this, for Trump, is that he is again set to
outperform predictions by speaking, as he likely will on Tuesday night,
in complete sentences.

Expectations for the speech appear to be low in the White House itself.
Trump’s aides have seemed, indeed, almost indifferent to the event.
Typically, a State of the Union is preceded by a ritual (if often
artificial) buildup of dramatic tension. During the weeks before, rumors
are circulated, strategic leaks are placed, and a proposal or two is
rolled out, hinting at big things to come. The Trump White House,
however, has done virtually nothing to gin up interest. On January 21st,
one aide complained to Politico that the government shutdown had thrown
the staff off its stride, and had put the theme and the tone of the address
“in
flux.”
But the shutdown was over the next day—an interruption so brief that it
cannot possibly account for what Jonathan Bernstein, in Bloomberg View,
called “the unmistakable sound of
nothing”
emitted by the West Wing. Since that time, a few proposals have trickled
out, but the significant ones suggest that this year’s speech will sound
a lot like last year’s: on January 24th, Trump said that he plans to
announce a $1.7 trillion infrastructure
package.
(In 2017, the number was a trillion dollars.) Officials have also made
clear that Trump will try to box Democrats into paying for his border
wall in a hostage exchange for “DACA amnesty,” a deal that leaders on the
left have said is “dead on
arrival.”

One of the clearest signs that the speech is not a priority for the
President is his failure to tweet about it even once—in contrast to his
insistent
promotion of his “Fake News Awards” earlier this month. (“The interest in, and
importance of, these awards is far greater than anyone could have
anticipated!”) Trump’s decision to drag himself and eight members of his
Cabinet to Davos several days before the State of the Union to tell a
gathering of global leaders that “America is back” was also strange; it
cost him time to refine and rehearse a speech that tens of millions of
Americans will watch. At Davos, however, Trump did test themes and riffs
that we are certain to hear again on Tuesday. “Over the past year,” he
declared, “we have made extraordinary strides in the U.S. We’re lifting
up forgotten communities” and “helping every American find their path to
the American Dream.” He touted job-creation numbers, “small-business
optimism,” and “the most significant tax cuts and reform in American
history.” In interviews, he has been pitching this narrative full tilt.
“We’re setting records every week, every day,” Trump told Joe Kernen
of
CNBC.
“The money is pouring in” from overseas. Foxconn, Trump insisted to the
Wall Street Journal, will build a factory in Wisconsin “because of
me.” (A tax-incentive
package of more than three billion dollars, provided by the state, might also
have something to do with it.)

A State of the Union address tends to follow a formula: take stock, take credit, chart a clear
direction for the year ahead. (And, as I learned in drafting these
speeches for Bill Clinton, it is hard to follow a formula without
sounding formulaic.) At this point in their Presidencies, Clinton, Obama, and
Ronald Reagan began their speeches by recounting the
circumstances they’d inherited, the steps they’d taken, and the results
so far. They did so with restraint. In part, this reflected the
precarious state of the economy in 1982, 1994, and 2010. But these
Presidents were less interested in grabbing credit than in building
their credibility. Not so for Trump. For him, taking credit has
always been an end in itself.

Trump must be aware that he is losing his bid to take ownership of the improving economy. He must know that, although sixty per cent of
respondents in a new Washington Post–ABC
News
poll said that the economy is in “excellent” or “good” shape, more assign the
credit to Obama than to him. This is partly a measure of Trump’s
record-low approval ratings, but it also indicates his failure to
articulate a clear governing strategy, particularly one that addresses
the economic problems that got him elected. Trump may claim credit for the passage of a tax bill, but at no point in the past year did it appear that he had
helped to shape it or steer it, or that he even knew exactly
what was in it. His State of the Union—however low we set our
expectations—can do little to dispel that impression. A year into his
tenure, Trump remains the man at center stage, but he doesn’t look much
like the man in charge.